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Man vs. History

Stories about people taking history into their own hands. We hear from two men in two different wars. One is trying to make a difference in the current war in Iraq. The other is with the CIA at the very end of the Cold War.

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Dal LaMagna made a fortune selling high-quality grooming products. And after retiring, he wanted to do some good in the world. His plan: Curb the violence in Iraq. He thought he could get the Sunni resistance to sit down with Coalition forces to negotiate a cease-fire. So he hooked up with a member of the Iraqi parliament named Mohammed Al-Dynee and headed to Baghdad and Amman, where, remarkably, doors opened to him.

This American Life gave Dal an audio recorder to carry into his meetings, and he recorded 25 hours of his remarkable journey through the Middle East as a would-be citizen-diplomat. Producer Sarah Koenig sifted through the 25 hours, talked to Dal about what happened, and put together this story. (22 minutes)

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One way to understand what war will be like is to understand what past wars were like. Andrew Carroll recently started something called the Legacy Project, which collects letters Americans wrote home during wartime, from the Civil War up through the conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia.

About a year ago, a John Hopkins University study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. It came up with a number—100,000 dead—that was higher than any other estimate, and was mostly ignored.